


The Harrowing

by pendrecarc



Category: Under The Pendulum Sun - Jeannette Ng
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Body Horror, Canonical Character Death, Catherine Helstone/Laon Helstone (mentioned), Egregious misuse of the King James Version, F/F, Marriage of Convenience, Necromancy, Sex Magic, Wedding Night
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-02
Updated: 2019-06-02
Packaged: 2020-03-08 22:41:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,062
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18904123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pendrecarc/pseuds/pendrecarc
Summary: The morning after the hunt, Mab sent a summons, and Catherine Helstone's brother went in his sister's stead.If she had responded herself, things might have turned out differently.





	The Harrowing

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kimaracretak](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kimaracretak/gifts).



> The hand of the Lord was upon me, and carried me out in the spirit of the Lord, and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones, and caused me to pass by them round about: and, behold, there were very many in the open valley; and, lo, they were very dry.
> 
> And he said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord God, thou knowest.
> 
> Again he said unto me, Prophesy upon these bones, and say unto them, O ye dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus saith the Lord God unto these bones; Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live: And I will lay sinews upon you, and will bring up flesh upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and ye shall live; and ye shall know that I am the Lord.
> 
> So I prophesied as I was commanded: and as I prophesied, there was a noise, and behold a shaking, and the bones came together, bone to his bone. And when I beheld, lo, the sinews and the flesh came up upon them, and the skin covered them above: but there was no breath in them.
> 
> Then said he unto me, Prophesy unto the wind, prophesy, son of man, and say to the wind, Thus saith the Lord God; Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.
> 
> Ezekiel 5: 1-9

We came down together at the Pale Queen’s summons. There wasn’t anything odd in that. She hadn’t seen Catherine Helstone’s brother slip out of my room when her message arrived, and she hadn’t seen me stepping over the stockings and neckcloth he had left on my floor as I dressed myself in my oldest and plainest gown. But when we came into the hall at the same time, she looked at us as though she knew.

“I have decided to accept your petition, Laon,” she said.

The light that came into his face could have blinded me, if I had let myself look at him directly. “You—you have? After all this time. Your majesty, I can’t tell you how glad I am to hear it.” His voice grew stronger as he spoke, until it reminded me of the sermons he had delivered before he came here, all conviction and no uncertainty.

She nodded. “On one condition.”

I felt more than saw him begin to reply, but he checked himself and reconsidered. “What is that?”

“This is in the nature of a treaty between our peoples,” she said, tilting her head so the pale streak shifted amid the brown of her hair. “And I know how treaties are sealed with your people. I want to be joined to your family in marriage.” My heart shuddered and stopped, like a clockwork whose gears had become caught. And then she turned from Laon to me. “I will take a wife.”

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She allowed us to leave her for a private conference. By the time we were actually _in_ private, when we had shrugged off Mr. Benjamin and escaped to the chapel, the truth of it had sunk in, for me at least. I won’t say I had thought it through and come to a conclusion. That suggests I’d had time to do so. It was more as though the natural purpose of my coming here had been revealed, as though the choice to contact the Missionary Society and arrange for transport, my reading of Roche’s journal and the murder of Ariel Davenport and even what I had done with Catherine Helstone’s brother, had all happened in preparation for this.

Cathering Helstone’s brother had not come to the same conclusions. “You’re not really considering it.”

“I don’t think there’s anything to consider. You came here for access to Elphane, and she’s given it to you.”

“What she’s proposing—sin doesn’t begin to describe it. It would be a mockery of marriage.”

“Yes,” I said, “but that is why I don’t think you can call it sin. It may be wrong of a man to lie with the fae, but is it wrong of the fae?”

“It is wrong, to lead another into sin—”

“And a changeling,” I went on, with a certainty I wasn’t sure I felt, “is more fae than human. If changelings are the children of God, then the fae must be also, and to join them in marriage is only natural.”

“To join one woman, to another!”

“As to that—I’m not a woman, Laon. No more than I am your sister. And if you try to assign sex to the fae on the basis of their form, well, the Pale Queen herself showed us how foolish it is to trust their outward appearance. Besides,” I said very softly, “I do not think she has such human desires as that.”

In his face I saw the reflection of his own desire. I wondered whether he thought of a night spent in my bed or of long hours spent in a tree-shaded garden. And beneath that, as always, burned a different sort of desire entirely: the passion of the zealot.

We were sitting side-by-side in the pew at the front of the chapel. I had to turn awkwardly to take his hands in mine. “Laon, I don’t know if you can understand. What I’ve learned about where I came from—I have to make sense of it, to know what I am and why I was made. _Before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations_ —you have that assurance, but can’t you see that I don’t? Let me have this purpose.” Here I didn’t have to manufacture any sense of conviction. I thought I understood Mr. Benjamin and his certainty on the eve of the hunt.

I couldn’t tell what swayed Laon, whether it was my pleading or the reminder of his own ambition. But when I went back to the Pale Queen with our answer, he was at my side.

She smiled at us—at me. “Tonight, then.”

“No,” I said, and faltered under her wide yellow eyes. Before she could ask for a reason, I said the first thing that came to mind. “I have nothing to wear.”

She laughed. “That is easily dealt with. I have provided for you before.”

I remembered all too well how that had ended. “It is tradition for a bride to provide her own trousseau.”

“And we must keep to tradition,” she agreed, with an over-solemn nod. “Very well; I will allow a day’s grace for you to find a suitable gown. But we will be wed in the morning and breakfast here after, so you mustn’t waste time. If you are not ready by then, you will be married in what I choose—or in nothing at all.”

I found it easier in that moment to meet her gaze than that of Catherine Helstone’s brother. I nodded, and making my excuses I escaped upstairs. I spent a despairing half hour combing through the back of the wardrobe for something I felt I could wear and wishing with a selfishness that ought to have startled me more than it did that Ariel Davenport was there to help me. And then, my hands pausing as I laid an ashy silk dress upon the bed, I wondered with an odd little shiver what had become of her gowns.

From my wanderings, I knew where she had slept, and it did not take me long to find the place again. I paused at the door and knocked, feeling foolish as I did so, but even though I knew there would be no answer it seemed the height of rudeness to force my way in without announcing myself. No answer came, so I tried the knob.

It opened soundlessly, and I stepped inside, pulling it to behind me. It closed not quite as soundlessly, and the noise it made was like the aftertone of a bell, almost at the edge of hearing. There was a little sitting room, not very large, with a wide window still streaked with painted frost. It was very still and very dark. The ashes, when I leant over the fireplace, were quite cold in the little hearth. I glanced about for a wardrobe or cabinet. Finding none, I moved toward the door at the far end. It hung a little ajar and led, as I expected, into Ariel Davenport’s bedchamber, which was round like mine but rather smaller, with an uncanopied four-poster bed at the far end.

Her body was laid out on top of it.

I nearly dropped the lantern. When my hand was steady again, I stepped forward and raised it to look at her better.

She was pale and waxy in the light of my candle and the faint rays of the pendulum sun. They had laid her out in the same blue dress she had worn for the hunt. Yesterday it had been torn by knife and thorn and stained with blood and dirt, and today it was more brown than blue. Someone had taken the time to stitch up the great rents in the skirt, though, and the wide punctures I had stabbed into the bodice. They had used a heavy scarlet thread and too many stitches. The mends lay like caterpillars across her breast.

I hadn’t thought to ask where she had been taken or where she would be buried. Was it even the fae custom to bury their dead? If so, would that apply to changelings? Was there a cemetery of the in-between where she would be laid until her body returned to the dust, and if so, would anyone be called to speak words over her grave? What could even be said?

I remembered Catherine Helstone’s sister lying dead in her coffin as Laon and I stepped forward to kiss her. I stepped forward now, to the very edge of the bed, and held my breath as I bent over and kissed Ariel’s forehead. Only a moment ago I would have said my lips were cold, but holding them against that lifeless flesh I knew they were warm and vital, and the knowledge turned my stomach. “I am sorry,” I whispered, pulling back so the words had just enough space to form. Then I shifted a little farther down on the bed and pressed my mouth to hers instead. The night before my lips had opened to Catherine Helstone’s brother, and heated breath had passed between them—his or mine, or both, as though the joining of flesh and spirit meant the joining of life, too. But there was no breath in Ariel’s corpse, and when I straightened again the red threads on her chest neither rose nor fell.

I went to the wardrobe next. I didn’t look over my shoulder as I opened it and began to sort through the dresses I found there. There were not many of them, but they were well-made. I thought she must have brought at least one good one here, just as I had. I found it in the back. It was a light summer gown of pale blue, entirely inappropriate for the season. But there was enough fabric that I knew I could let out the hem at least as much as I needed, and it would be the work of a few hours at most to alter the rest.

I put it over my arm and went back the way I had come. I closed the door between myself and Ariel’s body, and then I went up to my room to remake my wedding gown.

The Pale Queen didn’t come down to dinner. Catherine Helstone’s brother and I ate alone. I shouldn’t have been hungry. Only the night before I’d thought I might never eat again, and I knew perfectly well I didn’t need food. But I was going to be married in the morning, and I didn’t want to faint at the altar—or that was what I told myself when I went into the dining room. The moment I sat down at the table I realized I was ravenous.

“You’re very quiet,” I said.

Catherine Helstone’s brother made a strange, unhappy sound. “What is it you’d like to talk about, Cathy?”

“Don’t call me that.”

“I have to call you something. And you’ll need a name tomorrow morning. Have you forgotten the vows?”

I had forgotten them, actually. “Will you use the full order of service?”

“What else would I do?”

“I think you’ve picked the wrong time to worry about irregularities. For goodness’ sake,” I went on with a hollow levity, “you haven’t called the banns, and there’s nowhere to apply for a special license.”

“We may consider you a member of this parish, and I will issue a license myself. It’s not a concern.”

“And will it be a concern when you tell the congregants they have come to join this man and this woman?”

“I have everything in hand,” he said repressively, and went back to the roast.

“Laon,” I said, reaching across the table. His hand stilled when I touched his wrist. I couldn’t tell if he was stopping himself from flinching away or from lacing his fingers through mine. “Don’t shut me out, please. Not tonight. I don’t want the quiet. I want us to talk as we used to.”

His jaw worked as he considered and discarded several responses. Then he took up his fork again, and my hand fell away from his. “Very well. But you’ll need to provide a subject.”

“Elphane,” I said. He looked up, startled. “That’s what this is for, isn’t it? We’ll have to write to one another and describe absolutely everything. You’ll be admitted wherever you want to go, and I—I’ll go to Pivot. I’ve always wanted to see it. Has anyone told you what it’s like?”

“Not in any way that makes sense,” he said. A smile touched his strong lips, and I watched the curve of it without shame. “The light of this world, I think; for a city that is set beneath a pendulum cannot be hid.”

He kept the mood up well enough until the plates were cleared. When I stood he did as well. I opened my mouth, meaning to ask him to join me. I didn’t want the quiet in my room, either. But he avoided my eye. “Good night, Cathy.”

As I left, he reached for the decanter of brandy at his elbow.

We were married the next morning in the chapel, Mab and I. She wore a gown stitched of long sheets of honeycomb and a choker that dripped amber beads, and her eyes shone with the same golden yellow. I wore Ariel’s remade blue dress and shivered in the cold. Mr. Benjamin stood witness, together with a lady from Mab’s court who watched us with an owl’s feathered eyes, and the rest of her retinue stood in silent solemnity that must have been a great joke to them.

Catherine Helstone’s brother was certainly drunk, but I couldn’t have told it from his speech. It was clear and resonant as ever, and he didn’t stumble over his words as he joined us together. “Fae and Changeling,” he said, not Man and Woman. When he guided us through the vows he prompted Mab with her own name without hesitation, and married me under his sister’s name to the Pale Queen.

She took my hand during the readings. Her skin was very smooth and dry and a little cold. I looked up from it to her face. She smiled at me, slow and sure, and turned the pit of my stomach to ice.

We breakfasted on duck’s eggs and honey-glazed ham and, to my surprise, a light mead. The taste of it lingered; or at least there was honey at my tongue whenever I glanced at Mab, who sat on my left and ate with an eager appetite. The mead took the salt badly, but the food was excellent.

After the meal she set down her glass and clapped her hands, and her courtiers began to bring in gifts. A clockwork flower all in brass, which grew from a seed and bloomed and wilted as we watched. A set of six boxes the length of my forearm (three in varying shades of wood, one in ivory, one in a dove-grey stone, and the last inlaid with mother-of-pearl) that when opened revealed six types of salt from far-flung corners of my own world. A heavy cloak of feathers, each from a different kind of bird, lined with the skins of a hundred mice. And last of all a wicker basket longer than a man is tall, the width and depth of a man’s arm, woven closely from slender branches that shone silver in some light and were pale as bone in other. This was very heavy, and had to be carried in by six of her servants. As she looked on it she smiled, but she didn’t direct any of the servants to open the latch, and my courage and curiosity both failed me before I could ask to see inside.

And then at last the parade of gifts came to an end. The Pale Queen rose. I followed uncertainly, and Catherine Helstone’s brother took a moment longer than I did. At some point he had dismissed the mead and turned to brandy instead. I suppose he thought we were past the need for pretense.

“What do you have to pack?” she asked me.

“Very little, your majesty.”

“Then I will come for you in a short while. If you need a servant’s help, you have only to ask.”

“You will—come for me?” To my room, with the bolted door to empty air. To my bed, in which Laon and I had been together two nights before.

“Yes,” she said. “To take you to Pivot as my consort-wife.”

“So soon?” I stammered. “I thought we would have the night here at least. And don’t you have preparations to make?”

“We will go by the shorter route,” she said dismissively. “My retinue can follow after as they came. And Laon, too, if he wishes. I’ve promised him safe passage, after all. But I will have you in my home tonight, Catherine Helstone. So go, prepare for the journey. Say your goodbyes.”

Mab swept out of the great hall, trailing courtiers behind her. She went soundlessly except for the soft, sticky brush of honeycomb against the stones. I watched her go, then turned to Laon. He swayed just a little. “Will you come and help?” I asked.

It reminded me, oddly, of the last time I had packed for him. I’d folded away his clothes and the best linens we had, taking special care of the snow-white surplice and the stole I’d embroidered for his ordination. I had spent hours at it.

I had far less to bring with me now, and it took us no time at all before the trunk was as full as it could get. Laon had no idea how to roll stockings or fold a dress. When I arrived in Pivot, I would have nothing but wrinkles to wear.

That was the least of my worries.

When the trunk was closed, he paused. “Do you mean to take Roche’s journals?”

“Yes.”

“And the rest of these papers?”

“I do. Unless you mean to continue the work. Laon, we will have such opportunities as we couldn’t have dreamt of—as the Missionary Society couldn’t have hoped for. If we can manage a translation—”

“We? If _you_ can. You want to leave me to the knowledge these secrets are swallowing you whole, even as she—as you—” He turned his face away. I went and took him in my arms. I felt the strength in his body, the warmth of him. I knew he was strong enough for the task that lay ahead of him. I couldn’t tell if he was strong enough to accept what lay ahead of me, but that was my yoke to bear. 

“I’m only going home,” I said into the cloth of his collar. “Remember that. It will be like visiting a new land for both of us, but this is where I came from, Laon. It can’t be wrong to return to it.”

He would have replied, but there was a sound at the door. I took up my carpetbag and unceremoniously swept the contents of the table into it. “Come in,” I called.

Mab hadn’t waited for the invitation. She stepped lightly in, graceful and insubstantial under the stiff and heavy gown. “You’re prepared?”

“I am,” I said. “When will your train be ready?”

She shrugged, pulling the waxy hem half an inch above the floor. “As soon as they can be. We don’t need to wait for them. Our journey begins here.”

“Here,” I repeated. I thought at first of the gates downstairs, but that clearly wasn’t what she meant. Then: “Here. In this room?”

“We will go much faster on foot,” she assured me. “And there’s so much to be done.”

I looked to Laon in my confusion. “But—my trunk. I can’t possibly carry it all that way.”

“It will be collected for you. I can provide anything you need in the meantime. But in my house I think you will find your needs fewer, and your wants different, than they are here. Take my hand.” I did, after I’d picked up my carpetbag. She nodded to Laon. “Open the door.” He glanced behind him toward the hall, but the Pale Queen laughed. “Not that one.”

The other door, the narrower one, stood bolted against the void. Laon looked at me for a reassurance I couldn’t give him, and then he stepped forward, threw open the bolt, and took the great brass ring in his hands.

The wall tore open to the sky, and the wind seized the silk of my dress. I wished, inanely, that I’d had time to change into my traveling clothes. Laon staggered back, his face gone stark white. “Cathy,” he said, but I could barely hear him under the howling.

“Goodbye, brother Laon,” said my wife. “Join us as soon as you may.” She stepped forward, and though a second before I wouldn’t have said her grip was particularly strong I moved at the light tug on my hand as though she’d dragged me with her. I turned to look over my shoulder, as much not to see the emptiness ahead of me as to see my brother’s face. I tipped forward over the edge of space, and just before I fell I saw in his eyes the knowledge of what he had done.

I hoped, even then, it would be worth it.

My feet met empty air. I knew that I was falling; and then I knew that my feet had come to rest on a hard surface, but I was falling still—and falling _sideways_.

“Open your eyes, Catherine,” said the Pale Queen. I did—I hadn’t remembered closing them against the stinging wind—and reeled in confusion. Only her hand in mine kept me from falling. Falling _down_ , falling _up_ , I couldn’t tell. The surface I was standing on was quite solid, a shining stretch of polished brass perhaps three or four yards wide. As I looked forward, it bent up to meet my eyes and continued up and up—and as I craned my head back, I realized it was a huge metal disk, and that it was spinning on a dizzying orbit with us inside it.

My legs gave way, but her hand did not. I bowed down to the ground, trembling, with one arm stretched up to her. Somehow I’d kept my grip on the carpetbag. A great clanging beat in my ears, regular, but out of rhythm with my heartbeat.

“It will get easier as we go farther in,” she said. I don’t know how I could hear her above that sound, but her voice was as clear as though she’d spoken in my ear in a silent room.

“I don’t understand.”

“You don’t need to. But it’s easier to show you than to explain. Stand up; you won’t fall. I’ve granted you safe passage. And remember, Catherine Helstone, you are my wife, and this is your home.”

So I unfolded my shaking knees and lifted my head. When she began to walk, so did I, keeping my eyes fixed forward so I could almost tell myself we were on a flat brass surface, and that there wasn’t an astonishing, hellish emptiness to either side. As we walked, the disc began to spin faster, but I found it didn’t affect my balance. It only seemed to change the rate at which it slipped by under my feet.

“Tell me of earthly marriage, Catherine Helstone.”

“What do you want to know?”

“I want to know what it is to you. Whatever it means.”

“I—Laon said it, this morning. It’s all in the words. Instituted for—for Man and Woman. For the making of children. And the prevention of sin. And for the comfort of companionship.” It felt unreal to say so, with her hand pressed in mine. “What is marriage in Arcadia?”

“We’ll have to find out, won’t we?” The floor had begun to twist under us. Not just up and in that enormous circle, but _around_ and to the side, and as we walked we moved toward the outside of the disc.

I closed my eyes again. Without noticing, I had begun to walk in time with those clangs, which had started to sound like the ticking of an enormous clock. “Do the fae bear children?”

“Sometimes we make changelings, but that is a very different thing. And not, I think, what you are asking.”

“Do you—” I had been about to ask if there was sin in Elphane, the sort of sin the marriage bed had been instituted to prevent. But the question seemed foolish even as I thought it. Had it been sin, when I lay with Catherine Helstone’s brother? Was it a sin, to ape marriage with the Pale Queen? And would it be a sin when—if—I lay with her?

I had told Laon he was a prophet to the nations of the fae. He had come to show them the path to salvation from their sins. But if I was not real, and if my body was not real and could not sin, then—

My thoughts spun like the disc on which we traveled. When she interrupted them, I almost thought it could be out of pity. “We crave the flesh, as humans do, and as changelings do. But it is different for us.”

“How is it different?”

“You’ll see, soon enough.” There was a smile in her voice. “And you’ll have to tell me how it compares.”

That insinuation—not of what she intended, but of what she knew—startled me into looking at her again. It was a mistake. We had moved from the inside of the disc to the outside and had started to come back around. The disc itself was smaller, suddenly, very much smaller. I could see the great shadows of moving gears through the whirling mists around us, above and below. The surface underfoot curved in a much tighter arc, so I couldn’t place my shoes quite flat on it. “Are we nearly there?”

“Oh yes, Catherine Helstone. We have already arrived.” The next step I took was onto a perfectly flat surface. I reeled again, but only for a moment. When my balance steadied we were in a wide and empty hall, and it was as though I had always stood there. “This is Pivot, the cusp of the world and the asymptote. Be welcome here.”

The Queen’s palace was bare of furniture and, as far as I could tell, of inhabitants. The walls were broken only by queer metallic statues like gargoyles constructed of wire and pipe. The whirling of machinery continued outside that hall, but I couldn’t say how I knew it, because no sound penetrated those walls. Instead every rustle of silk as I moved, every touch of my shoe against the floor, echoed back to my ear as if from miles away.

“Where is everyone?” I asked, once I had my breath back.

“Most of them are coming the long way around. Those who didn’t join me at Gethsemane are still about. You’ll learn to see them in time.”

“To see—”

“What I wish you to see,” she said, in a voice like the high shriek of gears, like the low roar of a steam engine. For a moment my vision swam as it would if a dozen braziers had been lit across the hall, with a heat haze rising from each. I blinked, and the distortions disappeared. “You’ll want rest from the journey. For our wedding night.”

I clasped my hands in front of me, turning my face away as though interested in the nearest gargoyle. It looked like the head of a doe, shorn off and mounted, but the wide eyes were set with gears and the curving neck was made from hundreds of thin chains hanging gently from a brass frame. “And that is the same here as on earth?”

“Not quite.” I looked back at her, and there was that same sense of distortion, though the Queen looked clearer and sharper if anything to my confused eye. Her honeycombed dress was shards of glass, and her once-pearly teeth were the flat cogs of a gear. This image took a little longer to fade. “There are many rooms here, and I’ve prepared a place for you. Come to my chambers, Catherine Helstone.”

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I couldn’t have said how we arrived at her bedroom. The halls knew the way, even if I didn’t. I expected more unrelieved brass when she stepped through the door and was pleasantly surprised to find grey stone instead. The flecks of brown and burnt red in it were a relief to my eye.

The bed was not a relief, but a promise. It was laid in cloth of gold and was far too big for the old white linens she had slept on at Gethsemane. But to my knowledge, that bed had only ever needed to hold one. I took an involuntary step toward it, fascinated and frightened at once at what it meant for me, and only then noticed the long object laid on the floor at its feet—the wicker basket that had been among the wedding gifts.

My mouth turned dry as I looked at it. “Did this take the long way around, too?”

“I had our gifts sent ahead. We will need several of them tonight.”

“Is it night?” There were three long windows in that room, and all of them opened onto a vague grey mist. As I watched something stirred in that mist, something dark and unfathomable, and I couldn’t tell whether to be grateful it obscured whatever lay beyond. It was impossible to say whether the pendulum sun stood directly overhead or had reached its apogee. “How can you tell?”

“It is night when I take to my bed,” she said. “As I’m about to. Turn around and look at me, Catherine Helstone.”

I’d been avoiding that. I don’t know how long I thought I could put it off or to what purpose. I considered refusing her, but that would have defeated _my_ purpose, and I had only just found it. My obedience was surety for Laon’s safety and his mission. So I turned around, and I looked at my wife.

The dress of honeycomb had changed again. Those tiny shards of glass caught the grey light and flared up as she stepped toward me. Then I blinked and they were brass, blinked again and they were shavings of bronze. Then glass again, so I could see the shape of her beneath them, splintered into facets of color: the pale, pale white of her skin, the brown of the hair between her legs. The bud of crimson at the center of each breast, not quite as dark as the lips that curved in a smile as I took her in from head to foot.

“There,” she said. “Now come and touch me.”

I swallowed hard. My heart leapt, a frightened animal in her hunt. “You will cut me to pieces, your majesty.”

“Like you cut Ariel Davenport’s changeling?” Whatever she saw in my face, it made her laugh. “Come, and see what happens.” So I came and touched the edge of one sleeve.

It didn’t cut me. It wasn’t even sharp. It changed beneath my fingertips to the amber-gold of her eyes, and it was soft and surprisingly warm. I could smell honey in the air between us. “Which of these is the illusion?” I asked. My voice was softer than I’d meant it to be.

She shrugged. The movement shifted my hand along her sleeve, and the texture of it shifted as I did. “Bread and Wine, Body and Blood—which of those is true? How would you describe the Host you raise to your lips?”

“If you’re asking for an explanation of doctrine, you’ve married the wrong Helstone.”

“That’s a lie, but no matter. I’m commanding you to remove my gown, whatever you think it looks like. Or have I misunderstood what it meant when you promised to worship me with your body?”

“No,” I said. She turned her back, lifting her long hair away from her neck to give me better access. I reached for the collar.

I could see neither clasps nor buttons, so I just took the gown between my hands and pulled it apart. It tore like honeycomb, soft and waxy in my hands. Beneath it her skin was stark white. My fingers brushed the nape of her neck and traveled down. Had Laon’s fingers brushed that place? Her vertebrae were round and perfect, like ball bearings buried in her flesh. I peeled the dress away from her, exposing shoulderblades and the inward curve of her spine. And I paused, my hand resting just above her tailbone. Had Catherine Helstone’s brother rested his eyes there?

“Go on,” she said. She sounded amused.

She wore nothing beneath the dress. No shift, no drawers or stockings. It fell away like something she wanted to slough off, and after a certain point when there was less of her on it than off, the weight itself carried it away from her body. I let it go, and as it left my hands it the whole thing turned at once back to glass. I flinched as it shattered on the the floor, and she began to laugh.

Her laugh was such a human thing. Not the way it sounded, but the way it looked, the tremors in her ribcage and the way her shoulders seized up. Her buttocks were lean. The muscles of her thighs and calves were like wax dripped down the back of her legs. I saw for the first time that her feet were bare. They scattered fragments of glass in their wake as she turned back to me, letting the hair fall back down over one breast. The other stood exposed.

“What do you think, Catherine Helstone?” she asked. “Is this real? Do you trust it?” She stepped toward me once, then again. I tried to keep my eyes on her face. My own was burning hot, and my breath came short. I had taken in the bodice far too much when I remade Ariel’s dress. “And even if you don’t, do you want it?”

Something clenched inside me. I might have lied. I nodded instead.

“Then come with me from Gethsemane, my spouse,” she said. “And ravish my heart with thy eyes.”

I stood poised on the brink, caught between two duties and two sins, not even sure I had a soul to stain with them. And then I threw myself forward into the void.

She was brass and copper, glass and silver to my eye. The moment I touched her that changed and she flushed into life: still pale, but decidedly animal. Her skin was cold against mine, then warm like living flesh.

I had known burning desire before, and love with it. She had asked me to tell her how it compared. This was nothing like.

“Tell me,” she said in my ear, “of earthly marriage. Say the words you’ve learned.”

They spilled from my lips, stripped from my memory as she began to strip me out of Ariel's gown, and we fell back toward the bed. "Behold, thou art fair, my love; thou hast dove’s eyes. Also our bed is green,” I gasped.

And the bedspread was green, and she blinked at me with great, red-rimmed eyes. “Good, beloved. You have learned this well. Go on.”

“The beams of our house are cedar, and our rafters of fir,” I said. The marble above and around us began to crumble to dust, revealing walls and a ceiling made of polished wood. “I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys—”

She pressed her mouth to mine, but I no longer had a mouth. I had white petals that burst from my bell-shaped face, and instead of a throat I had a stem that pierced straight through to my heart. I reeled with pain and pulled back from her. That moment’s respite was enough; I had a face again.

I must find a safer verse. I wracked my memory for something better. “Thy hair,” I tried.

She reached up to twist one long brown lock about her index finger. “Yes?”

“It is—it is as a flock of goats, that appear from mount Gilead,” I chanted, watching in fascination as smooth brown turned to tight curls of grey and fawn. “Thy teeth are like a flock of sheep that are even shorn, which come up from the washing. Thy lips are like a thread of scarlet—” We were kissing again. Her mouth was a living thing unto itself, stomping like an unruly flock and seizing on mine. I buried my fingers in the rough curls of her hair and whispered, “Thy temples. They are like a piece of pomegranate—” The hair I had grasped pulled away in my fingers, leaving ruby-colored welts at the sides of her head; soft moist kernels fell away as I touched them, rich and sticky and with a cloying scent.

“Take,” she said, unconcerned by the nectar bleeding from her temples. “Eat of me. There is salt enough.”

So the Pale Queen reclined on the bedspread that was sometimes cloth of gold and sometimes the fibrous green of new wood. I reached into the boxes of salt we had been given and scattered it over her temples and ate of that sweetness. Mab opened her mouth to me, and I found salted honey and sweet milk under her tongue. Her breasts leapt like young bucks, and they fed on me in turn; I was lilies again, blooming open to her at breast and groin and throat. She lay back and I dragged my mouth down the tower of her throat to drink from her navel like a goblet of salt wine, and then she grasped me and turned me beneath her and my hair ran like a fountain, and my head turned to dew for her to lap up. My ribs broke into sheaves of wheat, my breasts into clusters of grapes for her to pluck. She ate and drank me dry, and then I remembered the next verse, and we began all over again.

At length I ran out of words and lay there at the foot of her bed, panting and hollow. I had been a garden, walled up. Now my blood ran with living waters. I shut my eyes and trembled.

“Now tell me, Catherine Helstone,” said Mab. “How does it compare?” And when I had no answer, she laughed.

I hadn’t quite recovered myself when from outside the walls I heard another of those great, mechanical shrieks.

“Good,” she said, seating herself regally in the center of the bed. She was still naked and didn’t seem concerned with this. “Now it’s time. It would be a terrible thing to waste the fruits of our consummation. Now you will see why I brought you here: the first of our works together.” She stretched out her long hand toward the foot of the bed, where that wicker basket still lay in wait. “Open it, Catherine Helstone.”

My legs were like jelly as I fell to the floor. It might have been more helpful if they were still pillars of marble, set upon sockets of gold. I pulled the cloth of gold with me in some vain effort at modesty and staggered around to the foot of the bed to stand over the basket. It no longer looked like wicker to me, but like bone—long, narrow bones woven together, the ribs of many fish or the wing bones of many birds. With a hand that was much steadier than it had any right to be, I reached for the latch.

I must have known what it would hold. It was the right size and the right shape. There had even been the right number of pall-bearers to carry it into the wedding feast.

The body of Ariel Davenport lay at the foot of my marriage bed, still dressed in the gown in which I had killed her.

“What is death in Arcadia?” asked the Pale Queen.

I shook my head, bereft of answers. “I don’t know. But I think you do.”

“Take her in your arms, Catherine Helstone.”

It didn’t even occur to me to disobey. I knelt beside the coffin and reached in. She was slight, and less stiff than I might have expected, but still it was an effort to lift her head and shoulders and slide one arm under her ribs. It was much harder to raise her than it had been to sink the knife in. I looked up at Mab; she tilted her head to the side as she gazed down at us.

“Now!” she said, voice underlaid with the clang of metal. “Give her your breath.”

For the second time, I leaned down and pressed my mouth to the cold lips of Ariel’s corpse.

And then I breathed into her.

The effects of this weren’t instantaneous. She resisted at first with the sheer stubbornness of death. Then I could feel the air moving through her, the ribs I clasped in my arms shaking and expanding with it. The bones moved first, cracking against one another and resettling. I felt the snap of sinews under her skin, regaining their elasticity and sealing the skeleton together. The slack flesh that clung to it began to grow firm again. I pulled back to draw a fresh breath of my own, then leaned in once more to expel it—and this time I felt her lips grow firm as well, and fasten upon mine, and take the air I offered from my own lungs.

Ariel Davenport stirred in my arms, and she lived.

Mab was laughing again. Over the howl of gears I heard Ariel draw the first, alarmed breath that was truly her own. She sat up, clinging to me just as I clung to her in the eye of this new world.

“Oh,” she said in fear and wonder. All my sins were melting together, transmuted into something new. “Oh, you’ve brought us _home_.”


End file.
